Flying objects

Two items from the solar system paid a call yesterday. One was expected, and the other dropped in unannounced.

The one with no manners was a spectacular meteorite that hit Central Russia.

The 10-ton-or-so piece of rock and metal lit up the sky over Siberia about 9:20 a.m. there. It created a thundering noise and long white trails as it soared, scaring people for miles around. Hundreds were injured by flying glass from windows that shattered in the shock wave. Jaw-dropping images of the fireball shot around the world.

Meteors are a common occurrence, but witnessing one so bright, loud and destructive is terribly rare. That this incredibly ancient object was caught on amateur videos while it flared and boomed only adds to its wonder.

The Russian Academy of Sciences estimated it was a couple of dozen miles above the ground when it exploded into pieces over the Ural Mountains.

For the meteor, the unfriendly encounter with Earth ended untold years of a placid flight through space. Hitting the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of about 33,000 miles per hour was like hitting a wall. It decelerated as it descended and eventually burst.

In Chelyabinsk, 930 miles east of Moscow, “There was panic. People had no idea what was happening,” a resident told The Associated Press.

All this from an object that’s a mere speck on the scale of the solar system — probably about the size of an SUV, according to Richard Binzel, a professor of Planetary Science at MIT.

Well, that flashy car-size rock reached the end of the road yesterday, hours before an unrelated extraterrestrial visitor made its close pass of our planet.

About 2:30 p.m. our time, Asteroid 2012 DA14, came in for a post-Valentine’s Day smooch with Earth. The asteroid’s orbit brought it closer to the Earth than some of the manmade, geosynchronous satellites we have placed in our sky.

This was, like the meteorite in Russia, rare in the extreme. At its closest, the asteroid, about half the size of a football field, was just 17,150 miles away.

DA14 created not fear but fascination. It was exactingly predicted, and NASA’s mathematicians assured us we were safe; it wouldn’t, couldn’t hit, their calculations correctly said.

Enthusiasts and researchers in Asia, Europe and elsewhere trained telescopes and binoculars on the minuscule dot. The asteroid was much more distant, even at its closest, than the International Space Station, which orbits at about 250 miles. Many probably wished its orbit could have put it even closer to our doorstep, as long as it can come this far, and that DA14, discovered a year ago, was not in such a hurry to be on its way.

Scientists said the two events were coincidental. Meteors are debris from asteroids, comets, moons or planets, and the origin of this one is still unknown. We hope many fragments of yesterday’s meteor can be collected and studied. The asteroid, meanwhile, is intact and hurtling away, but will keep researchers busy analyzing observations from the fly-by. NASA wanted to study its spin to understand its orbit even better.

The universe, to us, is so quiet most of the time. Then along come two solar-system strangers, each with a message for Earth’s lonely mailbox.

The first said: Surprise — you never saw this coming. But then the courteous asteroid affirmed our grasp of the universe in all its measurable orderliness.